Trade in a valuable tropical timber used in everything from picture frames and furniture to billiard cues needs greater control to limit habitat destruction and prevent overharvesting, the world's monitor on the illegal wildlife trade reported Thursday.
TRAFFIC, a network funded through a U.N. wildlife conservation treat, said illegal harvesting of Ramin trees was threatening the future trade of the species and damaging fragile forest areas home to other plants and animals.
Ramin is extensively harvested in Indonesia and Malaysia and some shipments go through Singapore. The timber is much sought after in the furniture trade because of its lightness, straight grain and blond color. Despite its popularity, few consumers know its name.
'Illegal trade tips the balance'
“Our main concern with the legal Ramin trade is that production remains sustainable. Legal trade from Indonesia is sustainable but illegal trade tips the balance,” said Chen Hin Keong, senior forest trade adviser for TRAFFIC in Malaysia.
“Our concern is the wider concern about the logging industry,” Chen said.
“Ramin is just symptomatic. What we would like to see is governments enforcing their own legal controls to protect and manage their forests. This is not happening consistently enough.”
Chen said TRAFFIC had no figures on the size of the illegal trade in Ramin but said it was driven by demand for the timber, its high value on the open market, legal loopholes and weakness in some levels of government to enforce laws.
This was particularly the case in Indonesia where officials find it tough to track timber logged on vast areas of private land or on state land where timber companies have been given concessions to log forests.
Swamps drained
Ramin is typically found in freshwater and peat swamp forests, which are sometimes drained to log the timber and to convert the land.
This dries out the bogs, which can burn for months if set alight, creating choking smoke clouds that can drift into neighboring countries.
The Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit group, says top export markets for Indonesian Ramin are Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United States, Italy and Britain. Prices vary from $600 per cubic meter for sawn Ramin to $1,200 for molded Ramin.
The group said the total volume of Ramin logged had dropped sharply since the 1980s, showing that the timber was becoming harder to find.
Chen said it was crucial that Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia shared intelligence on illegal shipments much faster. At present the response time was too slow, he said.
Additional background is online at www.traffic.org/news/press-releases/trade_ramin.html.
